Posted By dpacheco On May 20, 2010 @ 3:02 pm In Politics & Social Justice | No Comments

For a lot of people, what’s past is past. But there are some who still believe that if you break the law, you must be held accountable—no matter who you are. That’s the driving principle behind the accountability movement.

When Charlotte Dennett[1] ran for Attorney General of Vermont, part of her platform was a promise to prosecute former-president George W. Bush for murder. The state of Vermont has good reason to be angry: we’ve sent a disproportionate number of soldiers to fight and die in the Iraq War that Bush waged under false pretenses. In this interview, Dennett discusses the movement and her book, The People v. Bush: One Lawyer’s Campaign to Bring the President to Justice and the National Grassroots Movement She Encounters Along the Way.

Mary-Charlotte: So you had an encounter which was the kind of archetypal “I read a book that changed my life” encounter with Vincent Bugliosi, whose book is called The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder. Tell us about that book and what followed, the chain of events that followed from it.

Charlotte Dennett: Well, a friend had told me about the book during the late summer of 2008. She knew that I had tentatively decided to run for Attorney General in Vermont, being a lawyer. I’m a member of the Progressive Party—there’s three parties in Vermont—and they needed someone to run for that position, so I tentatively accepted, and she put the book in my hands knowing that I was also a journalist, that I’d had some experience in the Middle East, and she said she thought I’d be very interested in this book, and then she said rather cryptically, “I think there’s something in there that we in our different separate states can do about the problem of Bush sending our troops to war on false pretenses.